Everyone at Dreamworks, Prepare to Kick Yourselves. Hard.

Sure, sure ... Dreamworks have just commited to make an animated feature based on Neil Gaiman's Interworld and that should be pretty damn cool, I'll give them that. But, ouch. This has got to hurt. Less than a year after Dreamworks and Aardman parted ways largely over Dreamworks' attempt to control Aardman's output and disappointment over Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit's box office performance Aardman have announced their upcoming slate - which will be hitting these shores via their new deal with Sony - and, well, it's bloody spectacular.

First, Steve Box is joing forces with Life on Mars writers Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah to create The Cat Burglars, a film Box describes as family friendly Tarantino - a heist comedy about a gang of milk thieving stray cats to be shot in Aardman's classic claymation style. Basically the company has just landed two of the minds behind the best cop show in recent memory and given them a blank check to make a stylish caper film. Sweet!

Next, Peter Lord is joing forces with - gasp! - Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil to adapt the popular Pirates books by Gideon Defoe. If you don't know who Riley and Cecil are you need to head to Amazon UK and just start shopping. You'll find them credited on Robbie the Reindeer, The Armando Iannucci Shows, Black Books, Smack the Pony, Hyperdrive and Spitting Image among others. They're really, really good. Really.

Third? Oh god ... Borat co-writer Peter Baynham is developing Operation Rudolph an action-comedy that "shows the North Pole operation as an exhilarating ultra high-tech military procedure on a massive scale, revealing how Santa and his huge army of combat elves get round the whole world in one night."

Oh, and Nick Park's working on a new, non-Wallace and Gromit film. Yow.

All the details in Variety here.